One of the biggest factors considered in the design and development of software applications is ease of use. Often the difference between a successful software application and an unsuccessful software application is decided by the user's experience in interacting with it. Because of this, software developers generally strive to simplify the user's experience.
One particularly competitive segment of the software industry is data analysis software. Data analysis software deals with analyzing data and presenting the data to the user in a meaningful way. Typically, data analysis software includes mechanisms to generate graphical representations of the data, such as pie charts, bar charts, line graphs, and the like. Some data analysis software includes rich features to ensure that those graphical representations convey as much information about the underlying data as possible. For example, data analysis software that generates pie charts may include the ability to alter the color of the pie slices, change the size of the pie chart, modify the layout of labels, and alter other visual features of the pie chart. Each of these attributes is intended to allow the user to graphically display information about underlying data in the most meaningful way possible.
Sometimes, the data underlying the graphical representation is not all equally important to the user. This may be especially true in the case of pie charts. In some cases, a pie chart may display data associated with very many elements of data but the pie chart is dominated by a relatively small number of elements. For example, in a series of 10 or more elements, as few as two or three may make up 80 percent or more of the pie chart, with the remaining elements being displayed as very small slices. Typically, the user is most interested in the elements of data that dominate the overall presentation, and is less interested in the smaller elements. In cases like this, the smaller slices of the pie chart, which represent the smaller elements, are more distracting to the user than informative. However, at least in the case of a pie chart, those smaller elements cannot be simply eliminated because to do so would skew the overall presentation. In addition, labels are difficult to place on such a pie chart because an appealing layout for the few dominant slices may result in a less than satisfactory layout for the remaining slices. For the purpose of this discussion, the term “element” refers to a data entry that ordinarily results in a slice on the pie chart.
Users today have few options to address these issues. For instance, a user may modify the data entries themselves to make the pie chart more visually appealing, such as by manually combining less interesting elements from the data. Another option for the user would be setting a threshold that will remove the smaller slices from the pie. While doing so, the user is also changing the proportion of the remaining slices to the whole. However, these solutions do not make the user experience pleasant or it distorts the data. Unfortunately, an acceptable solution to these issues has eluded those skilled in the art.